A Voice in the Wilderness

André Villas-Bôas has helped the Amazon's tribes protect a quarter of the earth's freshwater and its largest remaining rain forest for decades. Now, as they face their most powerful foe, the future of the planet could hang in the balance—Adam Piore reports

Winner: André Villas-Bôas

In 30 years of helping the Amazon's indigenous tribes peacefully defend their lands from outsiders, André Villas-Bôas has been in plenty of tight spots. But it wasn't until 2008 that he saw the sharp end of a machete headed straight at him.

The weapon, wielded by an angry Kayapó warrior, was aimed at an engineer who had just given a presentation defending a massive dam project that the Indians feared would destroy their villages. Villas-Bôas had leapt from his chair in an attempt to shield the engineer from machete blows, but it was too late to prevent bloodshed. The other tribesmen were already upon them. Screams echoed through the cavernous gymnasium in the dusty frontier town of Altamira, as one of the bare-chested Indians ripped the engineer's neatly ironed shirt off his back, and another pushed him to the floor. The angry mob struck him with their war clubs and machetes. "Don't do this," Villas-Bôas shouted, his palms outstretched as he pushed into the scrum. "This will be very bad for you!"

As one of the founders of the leading Brazilian environmental and indigenous rights organization Instituto Socioambiental (ISA), Villas-Bôas had played a key role in organizing that day's protest against the Belo Monte hydroelectric plant, an 11,000-megawatt dam that would be the world's third largest. The demonstration had attracted several thousand people to protest a project many feared would have disastrous consequences for the Xingu River, the Amazon's largest tributary and a vital source of food and water for the thousands of indigenous people who live along it. But now the situation was degenerating into just the kind of violent fiasco Villas Bôas had spent his career working to avoid.

Though Villas-Bôas would later maintain that the engineer's life was never in any danger and that the Kayapó had only intended to humble him after a very arrogant speech, others present credit the activist with defusing a crisis that might easily have ended fatally. "I thought they were going to kill the engineer," says Marcelo Salazar, one of Villas-Bôas's colleagues. Antônio Melo da Silva, a leader of the movement to stop the dam, says that the incident would have been much worse if Villas-Bôas had not intervened. "They respect him, they listen to him," Melo says.

It's a trust Villas-Bôas, 55, has earned during his 32 years fighting, in the media and in the courts, alongside the Amazon's indigenous tribes to protect—and sometimes reclaim—ancestral lands from speculators, colonizers, and ruthless and well-armed loggers and ranchers.

But today, Brazil's tribes are facing new threats that are even more insidious and intractable. Agricultural conglomerates continue to make incursions into the Amazon Basin, and the country has developed a voracious appetite for electricity to fuel its industrial expansion. Belo Monte is likely only the first of many new dams that could destroy the very lands that Brazil's indigenous populations rely upon for survival. As a trusted adviser, advocate, and middleman to the Indians, Villas-Bôas is more important to them than ever. But at stake, he argues, is something far greater than preserving the rights and traditional lifestyles of Brazil's indigenous communities: The Amazon is the source of one-quarter of the world's freshwater, the planet's largest area of remaining rain forest and biodiversity, and one of the last defenses against global warming. "The Indian lands in the Amazon are immense," says Villas- Bôas, "and they have a great impact on the world's water and climate."

The heartland for many of Brazil's native populations and the setting for much of Villas-Bôas's work is the Xingu Indigenous Park, a 6.5-million-acre preserve in the Amazon's Xingu Watershed that is home to 16 ethnic groups.

Not long after I met Villas-Bôas in the town of Canarana, 1,200 miles from São Paulo and deep in the country's interior, he made his priorities clear. "This is a short trip, and I will be very busy," he told me pointedly. With him at the wheel on a bonejangling three-hour drive over primitive, rutted roads to the Xingu reserve, I got a firsthand view of the encroachment of the modern world.

It was August, the height of Brazil's dry season. And as the final outpost of civilization receded behind us, the parched, fallow soybean fields outside town presented a vast, desolate tableau that stretched as far as the eye could see. Though the first colonizers arrived in the area 39 years ago, the land was not considered especially fertile until trade with China picked up in the 1990s and local farmers began to feed Asia's insatiable demand for soybeans. Then, in the early 2000s, large agricultural concerns realized that the terrain was perfect for growing soybeans, and the pace of development exploded. Even ten years ago, much of these monochrome plains was still covered with the impenetrable green growth of the rain forest. But for most of the ride, all I saw were the solitary burned out husks of long dead trees.

After several hours of driving, a wall of green appeared on the horizon and Villas-Bôas announced that we were approaching the Xingu Indigenous Park. The electric hum of cicadas and the whirring and chirping of birds greeted us as we stepped out of the truck. On the edges of the road, thick walls of vegetation grew 20 to 30 feet high.

The park was established in 1961, after anthropologists argued for an area ten times as large that would protect the region's many tribes from the slow march of modernity inching ever closer. But once the reserve was established, anthropologists and the government convinced many tribes to relinquish lands outside the newly established park boundaries. Eventually, farmers moved onto the abandoned lands, burned down the jungle, and planted crops. A few years ago, Villas-Bôas told me, the lush terrain we were standing on was as bare as the fields that surround it. But after he helped the Kisêdjê tribe win back some 250,000 adjacent acres, they relocated from the interior of the park and the jungle grew back around them. "These lands," Villas-Bôas said, "are fundamental for the survival of these Indians. Not only for their resources but for their culture."

Villas-Bôas pointed out that the indigenous people here also protect the environment from exploitation. "You can confirm that with satellite photos," he said. "The areas where the indigenous live are preserved."

As I looked at the barren fields from which we had just emerged, and at the explosion of life around us, I had no doubt that what he said was true.

Comprising 60 percent of Brazil's land mass, the Amazon Basin is so vast that the idea that man could ever tame it—let alone destroy it— once seemed preposterous. For much of Brazil's history, the jungle was a forbidding blank spot on the map, an impenetrable frontier far removed from the populous center of gravity of cities like São Paulo and Rio. Villas-Bôas came of age during the era when all that began to change.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Brazil's military government launched a major effort to penetrate and colonize the interior of the country, warning that if land was not occupied it was vulnerable to expropriation by foreign powers. They offered tax incentives to entrepreneurs, promoted a migration of poor peasants, and carved roads deep into the jungle. It was during this colonization that many of the nation's indigenous tribes first came into public view. Growing up in São Paulo, Villas-Bôas was captivated by pictures of tribes in the news."It was a very mysterious world, and I felt drawn to it."

After college, he landed a job with FUNAI, the national organization charged with protecting Brazil's indigenous groups. He packed a knife, a Winchester .22, a flashlight, and a copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls and drove deep into the jungle to teach the fierce Xavante tribe how to write in their native tongue and to introduce them to the Portuguese language and Brazilian customs.

The Xavante were eager to learn and provided Villas-Bôas with a hut in which to instruct his first students. After three months, the elders summoned Villas-Bôas to the center of the village and sat him down in front of the fire to ask him one urgent question: When, they wanted to know, would he teach his students how to build an airplane? "It was another world, with a very different cultural reference," Villas-Bôas recalls. "I was a middle-class boy from the city and full of fantasies. I loved it."

He entered the nonprofit sector in 1988, after a stint in Xingu training tribes to run the park, and a tour mediating "extreme conflicts" between indigenous tribes and colonizers. In his first non-governmental job, Villas-Bôas helped tribes protect their borders from approaching colonization and traveled widely, promoting sustainable economic initiatives. On one such trip through Xingu in 1993, Villas-Bôas spent the night with several Panará tribesmen in a guest hut during a rainstorm. As they lay in hammocks smoking and talking, the Panará shared a story that would have a profound influence on his work.

In 1973, the government had built a road that had cut the Panará's traditional territory in two, and settlers flooded in. The results were devastating. Within 12 months, more than two-thirds of the 350-strong tribe had died from new diseases. Physically and emotionally depleted, the 79 survivors put up little resistance when the government packed them onto two military transport planes and moved them to Xingu, where they were forced to live in close proximity to their traditional enemies. Even after 20 years, the Panará felt like outsiders and yearned to return to their home.

Following a series of visits with the Panará, Villas-Bôas and Steve Schwartzman, an ally from the Environmental Defense Fund, agreed to take eight leaders on the 125-mile expedition by bus to see what had become of their ancestral lands. "The visit had a huge impact," Villas-Bôas recalls. "Everything was in ruins." Cattle ranchers had arrived first, then a gold rush. Small settlements had grown into violent frontier boomtowns. After years of hydraulic mining, Villas-Bôas recalls, the terrain outside town looked like it had been bombed. "The white men ate our land," Akè Panará, the Panará's leader, told Schwartzman soon after. "I'm going to find their chief, and he will have to pay me for all we lost."

Flying over their former lands on the last day of the expedition, the Panará gasped when they saw that some virgin rain forest still remained. To Villas-Bôas's alarm, Akè Panará announced that the tribe would return home, regardless of who now held title to the land and what they might do to protect it.

After researching the territory in question, Villas-Bôas and Schwartzman learned that it still belonged to the government but that rival factions had already begun to stake claims. One, known as the Group of Ten—powerful ranchers from Mato Grosso—had already constructed a small airstrip and had placed an armed representative there to guard it. Another group was led by the mayor of a nearby town. For months these rivals had battled for control, and several men had been gunned down in the jungle.

"We had to move very quickly," Schwartzman remembers concluding with Villas-Bôas. "And we had to be discreet." Using satellite images, they identified a spot 12 miles downriver from any sign of base camps, near a traditional village site. They ferried the first team of Panará to the area, and set to work constructing a runway that could serve as a lifeline for supplies while they built a plantation capable of feeding a new village. Meanwhile, ISA petitioned the government for the return of the lands and filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Panará seeking damages.

Soon, the land occupiers caught on, and the psychological intimidation began. At night, they fired guns outside of the camp. Shopkeepers in town warned Villas-Bôas and his allies that they were being watched. One developer sent a message through a tribal contact in Xingu: "Tell André Villas-Bôas and that gringo he works with that we're going to get them." And some in the indigenous-rights community accused Villas- Bôas of endangering the Panará by supporting their fight against powerful interests in an area notorious for lawlessness, violence, and land-related murders.

But in 1996, FUNAI decreed that the tribe was entitled to more than one million acres of land, a finding that became official when President Fernando Henrique Cardoso signed an executive order ratifying the decision in 2001. Soon after, a court awarded the tribe more than $1 million in damages—a mere token, but unprecedented nonetheless. And as Villas- Bôas watched the tribe dance and sing after long days spent bringing the final members of their clan to their new home, he knew it had all been worth it. "They were in ecstasy," Villas-Bôas says. "Many of them had only ever heard of the region, so it was very emotional."

The victory marked the first time a relocated tribe had petitioned to reclaim lost lands and won. Today, the Panará population has doubled to more than 350, and their battle has served as the template for campaigns that have resulted in the return of lands to the Waura, Naravute, and Kisêdjê tribes, among others.

In recent years, Villas-Bôas has extended these campaigns to win protections for non-indigenous people living in harmony with the environment—including a groundbreaking "extractive reserve" created in 2006 that allows rubber tappers to harvest latex from trees in a sustainable way. The reserve, covering hundreds of thousands of acres, is part of an eco-corridor named Terra do Meio that connects the indigenous lands of Xingu to those of other tribes to the north. But even as these battles have been won, new ones have arisen to take their place. These threats are no longer about outside forces usurping traditional lands—they're about what's being done to the water that helps sustain the communities living there.

Government planners first proposed building the Belo Monte hydroelectric project on the Xingu River in the late 1970s. The plans called for a complex of as many as seven dams that would have devastated thousands of acres of indigenous lands, and the tribes were up in arms. Mass demonstrations and worldwide publicity garnered by the singer Sting were enough to cause major backers, including the World Bank and the IMF, to withdraw funding, and in 1989 the project was shelved.

That victory helped cement the alliance between indigenous-rights activists and environmentalists that would lead to the creation of ISA, the organization Villas-Bôas now leads. But for the Amazon Basin, it was only a temporary reprieve. In the years since, Belo Monte's appeal has only increased among the nation's central planners—along with Brazil's growing need for electricity.

The newly conceived Belo Monte Dam, which will cost $17 billion, would divert the Xingu River along a 60-mile path through the jungle, and create a reservoir to power its turbines that would flood an estimated 20,000 acres and displace tens of thousands of people.

Despite local protests and an outcry from international celebrities ranging from James Cameron to Bill Clinton, the government granted final construction approval for Belo Monte in June. In September, a judge in the state of Pará issued an order blocking it, but higher courts have lifted at least 13 other injunctions, and Villas-Bôas and his allies have little faith that this one will survive. "There have been many injunctions to stop construction of Belo Monte," Villas-Bôas says. "The government or the company always succeeds in overturning them." Meanwhile, the social dislocations are already being felt.

On the outskirts of Altamira one morning, I stood on a blackened hill overlooking the Xingu, where some 450 local families had recently burned down the forest and erected a vast squatters' camp. Several families were forced to leave their homes because of the booming land prices; others had lived in areas that would likely flood when the dam was built. "We need help," 57-year-old boat captain Damazio de Lima Ribeiro told me as we stood among the burned-out stumps. "But the mayor won't meet with us. And we have no other place to go."

Later, I traveled some 28 miles down the Trans Amazon Highway with representatives of ISA to a meeting outside a plywood church, where some 50 farmers whose lands will be flooded by the dam project sat on wooden benches and discussed the possibility of blockading roads to prevent Belo Monte workers from reaching the area. "I don't know what I will do," said Manual Piras, an 80-year-old farmer, tearing up as he spoke. "This is what I know."

The Kayapó, for their part, have promised to fight the dam, with force if necessary—even if they die in the process. In a videotaped statement released in August 2010, Chief Raoni Metuktire appeared in a headband of radiating yellow feathers, with a three-inch wooden disk inserted into his pierced lower lip.

"If the government wants to build the dam, Brazilian Indians will unite and we will wage war," he warned. "If they kill us all, it's all right. But I will fight until the end."

Villas-Bôas has been at the center of the movement to stop the dam, working largely behind the scenes as an adviser. Now that the battle appears lost, his mediation skills are likely to prove even more crucial in the next phase.

Soon after the government granted approval to begin construction, Villas-Bôas began switching his focus from preventing the dam to winning equitable compensation for those who will be affected and, more important, to making sure no more dams will follow.

"Belo Monte is only the beginning," Villas-Bôas says. "We've worked to protect lands that span 69 million acres, more than half of which lie in the Xingu Basin. Above all, we fear the dams to come."

And yet, as devastating as they will be, the dams are not the only threat facing the Xingu watershed. Every year the lands of large agricultural conglomerates move closer to the borders of Xingu, and their impact on the 51.1-million-acre watershed grows more pronounced, as fertilizer and other products leach into the streams, and the trees that have long kept riverbanks from eroding and served as natural filters are felled. Between 1994 and 2007, the percentage of the watershed that had been deforested ballooned from 13 percent to 33 percent.

After some of the tribes in the park complained that the water was growing dirtier and the fish stocks were falling, Villas-Bôas launched a campaign in 2004 to educate farmers and cattle ranchers about the benefits for their crops and cows of maintaining a buffer zone of trees around water sources. Meanwhile, he and his colleagues have started a tree-planting initiative and lobbied the government to enforce a law on the books that requires a 100-foot buffer of vegetation in the margins of the rivers and a 300- foot buffer around streams.

Lying in a hammock in the Kisêdjê village one afternoon, Villas-Bôas admitted that the outlook sometimes appears bleak.

"Humanity is not doing well, so you have moments of profound un-motivation." He paused. "What comforts me is my contact with these people. After all they have gone through, almost getting extinguished, they still live with a joy that is contagious."